Situation assessment and behavior decision for vehicle/driver cooperative driving in highway environments

This paper proposes an automated system with respect to situation assessment and behavior decision not only for cooperative driving between a driver and the system but also highly automated driving in highway environments. The proposed system includes three main parts: (1) high-level data fusion to produce a better understanding of the observed situation, (2) distributed reasoning based situation assessment to evaluate the current situation in the safety aspect and to recommend actions, and (3) behavior decision to determine collision-free and goal-directed maneuvers for vehicle/driver cooperative and highly automated driving in highway environments. The system is verified that it can work properly for cooperative and highly automated driving through in-vehicle tests in several scenarios similar to real highway environments.